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ABSTRACT
Blockchain technologies are central to what has been described as a new ‘smart social contract’. With blockchain, individual cryptographic identity becomes the basis for new forms of money and for a whole suite of restructured social, political and financial transactions. But what do these developments signal for feminist engagements with the money economy? The transparency and pseudonymity that the blockchain provides has been welcomed as a ‘feminist weapon’. But the decentralised technology also legitimises many longstanding assumptions of libertarianism, especially competitive individualism, naturalised social inequality and the stability of value associated with the gold standard. Drawing on popular culture texts, Goldfinger and The Mandibles, this article considers this history, examining the gendered, racialised and sexualised discursive practices that attend representations of gold along with the ‘metallism’ surrounding blockchain-based cryptocurrencies in the contemporary conjuncture. By claiming to represent non-negotiable certainty derived from technology/nature rather than social convention, the fantasy of fundamental value returns, together with related associations of essentialism and authenticity, but anchored in this new context in the technocratic authoritarianism of FinTech. This is part of the background for the ‘new libertarianism’ whose ascendency now overshadows the neoliberalism that has been the focus of critical attention for some decades.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Lindsay Barrett, Dick Bryan, Kerryn Drysdale, Stuart Rosewarne, the editors of Australian Feminist Studies, and the two anonymous reviewers for very useful feedback and suggestions for further reading.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Fiona Allon is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She is the author of Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home (UNSW Press, 2008) and Home Economics: Speculating on Everyday Life (Duke UP, forthcoming), along with a number of articles on housing, households and everyday finance.
Notes
1. In the post ‘Satoshi Nakamoto Day: a Milestone in the History of Money’, Jason Dreyzehner Head of Design at @BitPay describes the symbolic importance of this date, outlining why ‘April 5 happens to be a very important date in the development of money’. Dreyzehner also refers to an earlier post by the cryptomarket analyst gwern on the Reddit site. Interestingly, Dreyzehner, like many other bitcoin proponents, describes himself as an ‘Austrian economics enthusiast’. https://blog.bitjson.com/satoshi-nakamoto-day-a-milestone-in-the-history-of-money-d80b486c0e7e. For a good account of the symbolic importance of Nakamoto’s listed birth date, metallism and libertarianism, see Brunton (Citation2017).
2. A common goal for libertarians, cryptoanarchists and cyberpunks has therefore been the development of new forms of digital or electronic money. Circulating without the need for any centralised authority such as a bank or other state-based institution, digital currencies do not rely on a trusted third party but are exchanged (pseudo)anonymously peer-to-peer. The underlying ‘blockchain’ or digital ledger technology ensures the security and privacy of any exchange but also guarantees that all transactions remain fully verifiable and transparent. Based on a new form of trust afforded by cryptographic algorithms, ‘digital cash’ (Brunton Citation2016) has been explicitly framed as a disruptive technology, its invention motivated by a political agenda that seeks not only to circumvent existing monetary arrangements but also to force change towards a completely new transactional environment.
3. This phrase has been taken from an advertisement on the reddit page: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/229qvr/happy_birthday_satoshi_nakamoto/. The full advertisement reads: ‘Bitcoin is the currency of the Internet: a distributed, worldwide, decentralized digital money. Unlike traditional currencies such as dollars, bitcoins are issued and managed without any central authority whatsoever: there is no government, company, or bank in charge of Bitcoin. As such, it is more resistant to wild inflation and corrupt banks. With Bitcoin, you can be your own bank.’
4. A blockchain is a database that aggregates a number of records in a ‘block’, which can then be added to a ‘chain’ of existing blocks using cryptographic signatures, creating a fail-safe and unalterable ledger of transactions. There are significant differences between ‘blockchain’, ‘distributed ledger’ and ‘shared ledger’ technologies. Not all distributed ledgers use the blockchain technology originally associated with Bitcoin, and shared distributed ledgers are now being developed for a variety of uses, many of which can be either public or private. Blockchain is one type of a distributed ledger but there are now very different applications of distributed ledger technology (DLT).
5. See, for example, Donald Trump’s interview with GQ here: https://thescene.com/watch/gq/donald-trump-weighs-in-on-marijuana-hillary-clinton-and-man-buns?mbid=marketing_paid_cne_social_facebook_scene_gq_dp_28. Accessed May 20 2018.
6. http://www.wmur.com/article/conversation-with-the-candidate-donald-trump-web-extra-2/4978766. Accessed May 20, 2018.
7. See for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=Um63OQz3bjo. Accessed May, 20 2018.
8. See https://fair.coop/en. Accessed May 20, 2018.
9. See https://humaniq.com/. Accessed December 15, 2017.
10. See DuPont (Citation2018) for a discussion of Ethereum’s attempt to develop a ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization’, or DAO, as a new mode of governance and the circumstances that led to its failure.
11. Alex van de Sande, lead designer at Ethereum, explains smart contracts such as the blockchain marriage contract here: https://blog.ethereum.org/author/avsa/ and here: https://forum.ethereum.org/discussion/1576/mist-preview-discussion-thread.
12. The Economic Space Agency describes itself as ‘a global collective working to remake the DNA of the economy’. It uses blockchain, and specifically smart contracts, to create ‘different ways for people to govern themselves, to belong and interact, to share stakes and ownerships, to recognise & offer value, to open joint opportunities, to risk and speculate together’. http://economicspace.agency.